While Constantinople thus dethroned and set up the civil rulers of the Empire, it was claiming for its patriarch the highest position in the Church. When at the beginning of the sixth century the patriarch John had signed the formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas, he repudiated any claim to superiority on the part of the old Rome: the two cities and the two Sees he declared were one. As early as 518 the patriarch of Constantinople called himself "universal bishop": in 595 the great Pope Gregory, who had himself, as a papal envoy, seen the greatness of the Eastern See, vigorously protested, to the Emperor Maurice, against the assumption to the title. But while the patriarchs used the title in no exclusive sense, they were determined, as they are determined to-day, to assert the independence of their See and its equality with that of Rome. Ecclesiastical independence did not preserve the Empire from political weakness. Phocas was soon seen to be worse than Maurice, and one conspiracy after another was begun in the Hippodrome and ended by a massacre in the streets. The Green faction in the Circus called the Emperor a drunkard and a madman to his face. Famine and pestilence ravaged the crowded city, and when Heraclius, already a renowned general, brought his fleet up the Hellespont and anchored at the Golden Horn the collapse of the power of Phocas was immediate, and a new Emperor was crowned in the great church of the "Capital of the World." The reign of Heraclius, gallant man though he was, began in almost unbroken disaster, and when in 615 Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians it seemed that the end was at hand. In the next year, as had already happened under Phocas, a Persian army encamped at Chalcedon. When negotiations were in vain, when Heraclius had even formed the idea of transferring the seat of Empire from Constantinople to Carthage, and had only abandoned it after his preparations were far advanced, when the terror and indignation of the people forced him to take oath before the patriarch in S. Sophia that he would never leave "the Queen of Cities," at length the courage of the empire awoke, the nobles sacrificed their wealth and the churches their treasures, the fleet utterly destroyed that of the Persians, and Heraclius delivered the city and the empire by a march as brilliant as it was daring. Leading five thousand veterans across Asia Minor and through the mountains he "penetrated into the heart of Persia and recalled the armies of the great king to the defence of their bleeding country." After three campaigns he returned in triumph and entered, as no Emperor since Theodosius the Great had done, by the Golden Gate.